It is terribly cold.
I left my woolly hat behind when I went on my walk this morning, and regretted it before I had even jumped over the beck at the bottom of the fell.
My ears were as pink as Barbie’s Favourite Dreamhouse With Three Magical Storeys by the time I came down.
The cows were frolicking in the freezing wind, leaping on one another and snorting excitedly. They were very pleased to see us coming, and galloped after us enthusiastically. This is never a good state of affairs, large cows have got fairly minimal braking ability on steep, muddy slopes, and poor Rosie, who does not like cows, hid behind me, quaking fearfully.
They avoided us on their way down, and then thought that they might rush back up the hill after us, and I had to clap my gloved hands and glare at them ferociously before they all careered off in the other direction instead, much to Rosie’s relief.
At least it would have been keeping them warm. I don’t think I would have liked to spend the whole day out on that icy hillside.
We did not go home. Instead we turned the taxi in the direction of the farm to collect the last of the firewood stacked there, because I could not shake the small anxiety that there might be a chance of snow.
It really is very cold.
It turned out to be a stack of firewood that Mark had cut at a time when he was experimenting to see if shorter lengths of firewood would burn hotter, which it turned out that they don’t. I was not at all impressed with this, short lumps of logs are awkward to carry, easy to drop and impossible to stack. I had an awkward hour of fumbling with frozen fingers before it was all loaded and unloaded and stacked neatly in the back yard, next to the bowl of bananas that I keep out there because they get ripe too quickly in the warm house.
Note to the interested. This works, as long as they don’t get frozen. It means you can purchase twenty bananas at once and bring them in a few at a time as you want them, without ever having to endure either the disgusting experience of being obliged to eat a blackening, mushy banana, or the uncomfortable guilty feeling of being wasteful enough to chuck it in the compost.
I was starving by the time I got home, and wolfed down my porridge – with added banana – with the enthusiasm of a Dickensian orphan.
After that the day was supposed to be almost my own, after I had faffed about with washing and getting dinner ready for the taxi at night, except it didn’t work like that.
I had sent Oliver a message to tell him that his new suit had arrived, and he protested that it hadn’t. This resulted in a prolonged search amongst their dustbins until eventually it turned up in a recycling bin somewhere in a servants’-entrance yard below the street.
He tried it on.
It fitted perfectly apart from the trousers being about six inches too short.
We sighed, and he repackaged it to return. Of course he is still going to be interviewed by the Army in a few weeks, so we turned our attention to the tiresome task of ordering a replacement.
Time is going to be running out by the time the new one arrives, so we ordered two, to be on the safe side, in the hopes that at least one of them would fit and not need to be taken to a tailor for adjustment.
Stupidly I forgot to put in his delivery address, and had to cancel and re-order them both, which took a considerable amount of eBay faffing about, honestly, computers can be very awkward and unhelpful when they feel like it, they are not at all interested in frantic pleading. I jolly well hope AI doesn’t take over the world any time soon, it is worse than a traffic policeman with indigestion.
That, and various other cyber-distractions, seemed to occupy the rest of the afternoon, until it was half past five and too late to start on anything new before I had got to go to work, so I thought perhaps I would write to you in the gap.
This will give me an evening of almost completely uninterrupted peace in which to read my book and maybe even find a film to watch on Netflix.
It will even be warm in the taxi.
I am looking forward to it very much indeed.
